The landscape of blue agave around Tequila is the best-known piece of this part of Jalisco, but its deeper story lies in a hillside near the village of Teuchitlán, where a civilisation built circles. Between about 300 BC and AD 900, the people of what archaeologists call the Teuchitlán tradition raised round pyramids with an outer ring of platforms, in a pattern that looks from the air like a target, and the locals call them guachimontones. They did not leave a written record, and no one knows what they called themselves, but the architecture suggests ritual and perhaps astronomy. The site's main group, with several of these circles, has been excavated and restored, and it sits on a lava slope above a small lake with the cone of the Tequila volcano on the horizon.
The agave fields are part of the same landscape. The blue Weber agave, which takes eight to twelve years to mature, is harvested by hand by jimadores, who cut away the spiky leaves with a long-handled blade called a coa and leave a heart like a giant pineapple, which is baked and fermented to make tequila. The old distilleries, the haciendas and the fields were inscribed as the Agave Landscape and Ancient Industrial Facilities of Tequila in 2006. The volcano, which rises to about 2,900 metres, gives the fields their mineral soil, and in the cool of the morning the rows of blue-grey plants stretch out in perfect lines.
The riding around here is excellent. From Guadalajara, the roads wind through the agave country on a fine surface with gentle bends, through small villages with colonial plazas, and the lake road toward Teuchitlán is quiet. Weather is warm for most of the year, and the rainy season, from June to September, brings late afternoon storms. The dry months from November to May are the best for riding.
Teuchitlán itself is a small town with a few thousand inhabitants, and it has a fuel station and cafes. For a bigger choice, head to the towns of Tequila or Ahualulco, or to Guadalajara, a huge city of several million. The ride list leads to the Hospicio Cabañas, the neoclassical orphanage in the centre of Guadalajara, with its murals by José Clemente Orozco, whose figure of a man on fire in the dome is one of the great paintings of Mexico.
Drink tequila politely, and not before you ride.